Two mathematicians used large language models to discover counterexamples to long-standing conjectures, automating hypothesis generation and testing with minimal guidance. The article calls this “brute intelligence,” where AI runs iterative search loops to tackle any problem framed like a math exercise. It argues we’ll need to reshape tasks into testable, calculable formats for AI to industrialize discovery across fields.

This MIT course focuses on estimating answers and tackling problems through intuitive shortcuts instead of formal proofs or exact calculations. It covers guesswork techniques and heuristic strategies to quickly arrive at useful results.